"What makes you itch? What sort of the situation would you like? Let's suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance of students: they come to me and say well, we are getting out of college and we haven't the faintest idea what we want to do. So I always ask the question: What would you like to do if money were
no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life? Well it's so
amazing as the result of our kind of educational system, crowds of
students say 'Well, we'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets,
we'd like to be writers' But as everybody knows you can't earn any money
that way! Another person says 'Well I'd like to live an out-of-door's
life and ride horses.' I said 'You wanna teach in a riding school?'

Let's
go through with it. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to
something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to
him 'You do that! And forget the money!' Because if you say that
getting the money is the most important thing you will spend your life
completely wasting your time! You'll be doing things you don't like
doing in order to go on living - that is to go on doing things you don't
like doing! Which is stupid! Better to have a short life that is full
of what you like doing then a long life spent in a miserable way. And
after all, if you do really like what you are doing - it doesn't really
matter what it is - you can eventually become a master of it. It's the
only way of becoming the master of something, to be really with it. And
then you will be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't
worry too much, somebody is interested in everything. Anything you can
be interested in, you'll find others who are.

But it's absolutely
stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like in order to go on
spending things you don't like, doing things you don't like and to
teach our children to follow the same track. See, what we are doing is
we are bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lives
we are living. In order they may justify themselves and find
satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their
children to do the same thing. So it's all retch and no vomit - it never
gets there! And so therefore it's so important to consider this
question:

Sunday, November 4, 2012

It was fun to decorate my desk for Halloween @ Vision Critical. There was a contest for the best decorated department and a party with food, snacks and beer! Kids came to collect candies from our desks and people had their costumes on! It's fun to work in such an environment!

Monday, October 22, 2012

Have you ever been asked this question in a technical interview for a software related position: "Using the language of your choice, reverse the words in a sentence."? If so, have you ever wondered how many solutions in different languages exist? Scripting, object-oriented, functional programming, commands, and the list could go on...

Thanks to Andrew for providing such a short and cool solution that might show why Linux users just love Linux and its tools! You can try this on a Linux terminal: echo "this is the sentence to reverse" | tr ' ' '\n' | tac | tr '\n' ' '; echo

Fyi, tr stands for translate character, which means that it will search for all the ' ' (spaces) and replace them with '\n' (new line); tac prints a file/string in reverse, like the opposite of cat.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

In Six Feet Under, episode 5 season 2, the family was talking about a lady that had nobody in her life. They stated how awful that was and concluded that she might have been autistic thus the reason for not having anyone in her life. Then Claire, a teenager in the series, said:

"I don't see why this person has to be mentally ill... just because she had a life that doesn't conform to a familiar image in our heads. Maybe she was living the life she wanted. A life without the hassle of other people."

Don't you agree with her? Don't you think that we sometimes judge the person in front of us just because he/she is different and does not conform to the image we have in our head? It just made me pause and think...

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

HackVan was last weekend, on Friday the 23rd of March and Saturday the 24th of March 2012, and it was awesome! I had a great time, took first steps into mobile development & was amazed by what the Vancouver tech community can accomplish in few hours!

HackDays is an event that takes place across several cities in Canada. Last weekend it was here in Vancouver and located at A Thinking Ape. The event began on Friday night by having a mixer in Electric Owl where participants got to know each other and form teams. On Saturday at 9am, 100 developers gathered to begin the coding day! Eight sponsor APIs (Yellow Pages, FreshBooks, TinEye/Idée, iQmetrix XQ, HootSuite, Shopify, Twilio & PhoneGap) had representatives there. The rule was to implement something using at least one of the sponsor APIs in few hours and present it to the other teams and the judges for a chance to win prizes.

It was such a nice event and I would recommend everyone to check it out. Special thanks for all the organizers and I am looking forward to next year's event!!

Monday, January 23, 2012

I would like to thank Jeremy Hutchings for writing this nice post: Interviewing & Dating for the Techie : Playing the game! At this moment, I am currently going through interviews, from the interviewee's side. I normally evaluate the outcome of my interviews and I sometimes really think that employers don't consider the points Jeremy has written at all anymore! As I wish what he is saying would be the way to go, I am so pleased to know that these concepts still exist and are believed in by someone other than myself and the other interviewees! So again, thank you Jeremy!

Here are some extracts from his post that are really highlighting the points I am talking about:

> "So what if they don't have the specific skills now, if they are the right people they will learn them."

> "There is a balance between skills in the work place, and more importantly in teams. Personally I rate the ability to communicate (ideas, questions, learning, etc) and the desire to learn very highly."

> "Interview for future potential, not just current limits. If you don’t, you are limiting both of you from the outset. You will loose the good people, as they will get frustrated. So think about their future as well as the organisations when talking."

> "If a person can’t get excited about a topic that is core and relevant to the company then it’s a warning flag. Even if they can’t explain the exact details there and then, given passion they’ll put in the hours to learn. It’s the mindset it’s the passion, if they don’t have it move on."

> "I look for the understanding of logic itself, and how it is applied and used in real world contexts. A programming language (mostly) is just a tool, solving the riddle is the prize."

> "I do it in PHP, you do it in ASP; meh, we both go to the bar !"

> "I appreciate the power that comes from understanding how everything works down to the CPU and assembler level, as I studied it throughout my life since I was 9, and at university for years. Though I don’t expect every developer to know all of it, all of the time."

> "We (developers) tend to get rather good at what we do in the moment, I might not know Erlang now, though give me a challenge and some time. It’s the ability to learn and adapt to get a problem solved, that I look for."

Marleine Mounir Daoud

Currently working as an Intermediate Software Engineer at Vision Critical in Vancouver, Canada. Previously worked as a Software Development Engineer in the Software Group of IBM Deutschland R&D GmbH in Germany.

Graduated in Summer 2011 from the International Master program: INFOTECH in Universität Stuttgart, Germany, receiving the Master of Science (M.Sc.) degree in Information Technology.

Having lived, worked and studied in Canada, Egypt & Germany, I decided to go back to my childhood country after having graduated.